[Mark Wheaton]

Any off the shelf mac can function as a web server under OSX. Also any account with an ISP will probably provide web hosting services that allow ftp if you ask. Therfore it may not be necessary to have an in house web or ftp server such as the Digi product.

The trick is, do you have fast upload connections? Standard DSL accounts (in the $30 per month range) provide fast Download and slow (128K or less) Upload speeds. Also, if your isp restricts traffic on your connection you may not be able to upload large files anyway.

The advantage of an in house server, is, You don't have to worry about upload speeds because it is a computer to computer transfer, but the person accessing your files Will have face your upload speed no matter what their download speed is. In other words the file still needs to upload to the isp whether you do it to post on a remote ftp server, or your client does it by accessing your files. If your upload speed is standard, it will be incredibly slow to upload anything other than mp3s whether you have this device (Digidelivery) or not. Fast uploads are available from isps such as SBC Communications as premium or enhanced service and cost anwhere from $80 per month for about 384K upload to well into the hundreds per month for T1 speeds. (1.5meg) (by the way internet and modem speeds are measured in bits not Bytes and therefore are an order of magnitude slower than hard drive speeds.

Even at T1 speeds, it will take a long while to upload uncompressed audio tracks. If you upload an entire CD of multitrack sessions it could take hours to post the session even at T1 speeds. That is reality whether you invest in this box or not. i usually find it more time efficient to just burn a CD or DVD and ship via US Post. I post short files or mp3s as proof copies only onto my ftp site, which I get from my web hosting service as part of the standard $20 or less per month fee (this is in addition to the isp fee which for enhanced DSL is about $80 per month.) You will have to pay at least the isp fee whether you have a dedicated in house web or ftp server or not.
I know this sounds overwhelming and it is.

Political diatribe follows:
The promise of the internet has been "postponed" while corporations figure out ways to squeeze the small guy for as much as possible while charging a premium to have fast up and down speeds despite the fact that they could offer this at the same price if they chose to. The fact is, they are trying to keep out the riff raff by keeping prices high. However if the government took back the internet and regulated it, fiber optic internet could become a reality and would allow almost real time transfers of data. This may or may not happen in our lifetime because of "privatization and de-regulation" This is the hidden reason why the dot com bust occurred. The companies that were poised to profit never saw an internet that delivered on the promise, because companies were too busy fighting turf wars instead of installing infrastructure. It may be that only a government funded project much like the interstate highway project of the fifties could handle the job. The only other way is a sanctioned monopoly such as the Bell companies enjoyed when they installed the phone system we take for granted today.